The writer Andrée A. Michaud brings nightmarish situations to a family of campers in her new novel, “Baignades”

Playing on the strings of action, drama and suspense, the talented Andrée A. Michaud presents this year Swimmingan intense, confusing, distressing novel, the action of which begins on a campsite. This is definitely a novel not to be read alone in your tent, in your trailer or in your chalet, in an isolated place deep in the woods. The multi-awarded writer to whom we owe Storms et Buzzardamong other things, distills fear and imagines nightmarish situations in which no one would want to find themselves. Especially not innocent campers.

In this richly written novel, fabulously anchored in reality by a host of small details, Andrée A. Michaud tells the story of Max, Laurence and Charlie, their little daughter.

The family borrowed a huge RV from friends and began a well-deserved vacation at a campsite, imagining themselves relaxing, swimming, cycling or walking in the forest in complete peace and quiet for three weeks.

The neighbors seem nice, the place is friendly and everything looks perfect. Until a meeting goes wrong and forces Max, Laurence and Charlie to flee.

Angry, they take the wrong path. As misfortune never comes alone, the storm breaks out. They are lost in an unfamiliar place and the problems begin. Real problems. Much worse than being stuck on a woods road, in the dark, in the middle of a storm, without cell phone coverage, without enough space to turn back with a large RV (which is already a camper’s nightmare!).

More and more worrying

Andrée A. Michaud has an extraordinary talent for captivating her readers. “I don’t have a recipe! I let myself go and try to imagine. Myself, little by little, I see that the situation is becoming more and more tense. That the suspense is more and more worrying and I try to continue in this direction to keep my readers until the end.

She does not portray her own anxieties or her own fears. “I think I’m talking about very universal, very widespread fears: the fear of finding yourself alone, lost in the middle of the forest when you don’t know exactly where you are… Those aren’t really my fears.”

“The fear comes from the staging,” she explains. “These people who went camping weren’t destined to experience something like this, but there’s a little thing that happens, and another, and another… And all that piling up, they find ourselves backed into a corner.”

“These are not my own fears. If it were my own fears that I acted out, it would be really scary!” she said with humor.

A horrible individual

Andrée A. Michaud explains how she constructed the character of Hank Simard, a horrible individual who sows terror in the novel. “From the start, we see that he is a fairly intolerant man who imposes his way of seeing and thinking. It could have stopped there. He has his little orgies… I say it in the novel.”

“In broad daylight, he is an upright man, with principles, but in private, he allows himself a lot of liberties. It could have stopped there. It all comes down to the fact that the situation, too, escapes him when the woman he takes for his little orgy at his camp realizes that she was completely mistaken about his intentions. And then everything goes wrong.”

Swimming

Andrée A. Michaud

Editions Quebec America

312 pages

• Andrée A. Michaud is the author of 14 novels, each more disturbing than the last.
• She received the Governor General’s Award twice for The Rapture et Buzzardand the Arthur-Ellis prize for detective novels in the French language for Buzzard et Storms.
• She also received the Ringuet prize from the Academy of Letters, the Saint-Pacôme prize for detective novels, the Quais du polar/20 minutes de Lyon readers’ prize, the Rivages des bookstores prize, the SNCF detective prize and the Moussa Konaté of the French-speaking thriller.
• It is translated into several languages.
• She will be at the Montreal Book Fair.

“Max had sighed. Well let’s see, a man, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, hidden in the woods to scare the two imbeciles who took the wrong path. You must have heard a deer, Laurie, or a raccoon, maybe a fox, but certainly not a man.”

– Andrée A. Michaud, SwimmingEditions Quebec America

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